


and you can't feel anything small

by icarusandtheson



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 06:35:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20670905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarusandtheson/pseuds/icarusandtheson
Summary: Alex struggles through his latest piece and George's proximity. Neither of these things is particularly novel.





	and you can't feel anything small

“Sharp again,” George comments, eyeing Alex’s painting with a keen awareness Alex doesn’t want anywhere near him or his work right now. “I thought you were working with softer colors.”

“I got bored.” Alex blocks out another jagged slice across the canvas, ignores the feeling of George’s eyes on him. “It’ll sell fine.”

“I’m not worried about that,” George says, patient as ever. “Is everything alright?”

“Yeah.” If he was still an angry, overdramatic kid he would fill the slice with a red bright enough to cast its own glow, but he’s not, and if he used red he might as well paint _ LOOK AT ME _across his forehead. 

And George would. George would see it and read it for what it was, and he would look. That’s the whole problem. 

Alex backs up a little on the spectrum, reaches for an orange instead. There’s a proper name for it that he’ll trot out when he’s talking about the piece to buyers, some bullshit about balance and coordination -- right now it’s bright in a way that makes his teeth hurt, which makes it the right color to use. 

“Do you mind if I work here for a while?” George asks, like he believes him, like Alex isn’t dragging something onto this canvas that wouldn’t be out of place in his first collection. 

“It’s your studio.”

“If you need the space, you can have it.” When Alex doesn’t say anything, George shoulders his bag again, and Alex can already hear footsteps across the floor, the door closing. The blank spaces of the canvas yawn open in front of him, a white abyss. Something curdles low in his stomach. 

“Stay,” Alex says, and again, “You can stay. It’s fine.”

It’s not the most elegant request he’s ever managed, and the quiet arch of George’s brow says as much, but he doesn’t comment further. He shrugs out of his coat and sets up quietly, familiar movements and noises. Alex settles as much as he can with another body in the room, with that particular body in the room, and focuses on his work.

The orange carves out a space for itself. Aesthetically it works, making sense in all the ways it doesn’t. The whole thing sets him on edge when he looks at it, which is the point, he thinks, or was the point when he started it. It was easier to grasp the concept when he was alone. Now the final image is fuzzy in his head, half his focus on George: the presence of him solid and unmistakable, and the color the light turns his eyes when he glances up into it, considering. 

Alex’s fingers twitch with the familiar urge to break something down into essentials he can translate into color, texture, feeling. He shakes it off and fixes his eyes on his painting, nevermind that it looks -- different, somehow. Loud in a way that doesn’t say much of anything. 

It’s fine. It’s maybe even finished. Alex can’t tell. He abandons the canvas to find his notebook, flips through it like it’ll let him know either way, and it doesn’t. It just gives him more ideas he wants to start teasing apart, and the thought of working on two of three pieces at once because he can’t fucking _ concentrate _ while George patiently works his way through some poignant, detailed study of light streaming through the windows, or the street below, or some other image he’s holding in his mind with careful, focused attention -- 

He’s not dealing with it. Something’s wrong with the painting. He’ll fix it or he’ll scrap it. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. He waits for the colors to resolve themselves into something meaningful and tries not to hate the whole thing too much. 

He feels eyes on him, and tries not to hate that too much, either.

There’s quiet, George’s brush on canvas the only sound. Alex lets out a breath through his teeth and crosses over to the windows. They’re too high up for him to see the street properly, and the cityscape isn’t anything new to him, not anymore.

“It’s good work,” George says into the silence. “You’re allowed to leave it at that.” 

Alex shrugs, but some of the tension bleeds out of him at the praise. He’d paint the feeling in watercolor, maybe. The same shade as all the light streaming in. The inevitable lurch in his gut after: a straight black line bisecting the canvas.

He wanders back over to his work, eventually. It’s fine, it looks fine. George is humming something under his breath, his strokes rhythmic and even. Every once in a while he glances over at Alex. Alex could paint an entire canvas in that same shade of brown, splinters of gold scattered in like refracting light, like a small sun -- that close it would be impossible to take it for what it was, and no one would have to know. 

_ Leave it, _George said. So he looks away, and he does.

**Author's Note:**

> *Thanks for reading! Leave a kudos and comment if you liked it!  
*I'm on Tumblr at [icarusandtheson](https://icarusandtheson.tumblr.com/), come say hi!


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